PCI Exp2 and Crossfire/SLI

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shawn81

shawn81

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Dec 5, 2011
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Im fisihing for someone with some experience on running Crossfire.

I'm curious how performance compares in systems running cards crossfire and mainly the difference seen in between a x16, x4 setup and a x16, x16 setup and applying it to mine...

AMD TA970 Motherboard, PCIe16 x2, (x16, x4) and say a second identical board, but (x16, x16).
Coupled with 2 GeForce 550Ti's.
FX 8350 Vishera Black Ed.

Would a crossfire setup work worth a damn being 16x4? Would it be better off with another GPU that's a few steps up from a 550Ti? And how far above a 550Ti would i have to go to surpass the setup i'm asking about, with the x16, x4 slots and 2 GeForce 550Ti instead of x16, x16 with the two 550Ti's?
 
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woltej1
When you crossfire or sli, you aren't really doubling the bandwidth of your total gpu power, meaning if you crossfire in x16, x16, you don't have 32 lanes. The difference is x16, x16 is more efficient because you still have 16 lanes of pcie between the 2 cards, but those lanes are split between the cards unevenly, depending on how much use either card is getting. While other set ups would be x8, x8 permanently. This is able to work because most graphics card cannot come close to saturating the pcie slots bandwidth, so there's a lot of unused space most of the time. 550ti's are not powerful cards so they would not saturate an x4 pcie 2.0 slot, so yes, with those cards it would be worth it to sli.

550ti sli is a few fps slower than a...
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woltej1

woltej1

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Nov 15, 2010
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When you crossfire or sli, you aren't really doubling the bandwidth of your total gpu power, meaning if you crossfire in x16, x16, you don't have 32 lanes. The difference is x16, x16 is more efficient because you still have 16 lanes of pcie between the 2 cards, but those lanes are split between the cards unevenly, depending on how much use either card is getting. While other set ups would be x8, x8 permanently. This is able to work because most graphics card cannot come close to saturating the pcie slots bandwidth, so there's a lot of unused space most of the time. 550ti's are not powerful cards so they would not saturate an x4 pcie 2.0 slot, so yes, with those cards it would be worth it to sli.

550ti sli is a few fps slower than a 570, so I would say it'd be worth it to look at a 760 or 770 if those are in your price range.
 
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